Sept 2024 TWIM Retreat Orientation: Metta Instructions with a Guided Meditation and Instructions.

This meditation, we'll start off first. I'd like you to close your eyes, sit straight, and keep your back straight. You don't need to be too straight, just enough to be relaxed, and you don't slouch. Just take in a deep breath and exhale slowly, and when you exhale, just be present with your body. Take another deep breath, and when you exhale, just feel your entire body relax, loosen up the body. Notice any tension or tightness anywhere in the body, from the top of your head to the tips of your toes. Just relax.

Now, I'd like you to put a small smile on your lips. Yeah, this is very important. The smiling will help you to keep mindfulness going. It will help to keep the mind uplifted. And it will help you to tune into the loving kindness, which is the primary object of meditation for this practice. A small smile on your lips, a little smile in your eyes, a little smile in your heart.

Now, you can use different phrases. You can say, may I be happy, may I be well, may I be filled with loving kindness in your mind. You can use these phrases in your mind a couple of times, three, four times, until you feel something in your heart. Or you can think about things that you're grateful for: the children in your life, the friends that you have, the people and relationships that make you happy, whatever it is that you're grateful for. That's one option. Another option is to think about and imagine a small little puppy or kitten in front of you, that you're holding them in your arms, or a cute chubby little smiling baby looking out at you.

You're holding them and you're smiling and giggling at you. Or you could think about a wholesome memory. It doesn't matter what it is, as long as you feel a sense of upliftedness. And you will experience a warmth, a glowing, warm sensation in your chest, in the middle of your chest, in your heart, your spiritual heart. And I want you to just rest your awareness in that sensation, in that feeling, in the heart.

That warm glowing sensation is the beginning of loving kindness. You are sending loving kindness to yourself. Just settle into that and relax. Thank you. Thank you. Now, inevitably, while you're sitting here, your mind is going to go off in different directions, and that's okay. There are different distractions that come up, and you just allow them to be there. You might notice that your mind got caught up in that. But this is the first step in bringing your mind back to a meditative state.

This is called recognize. Recognize you were distracted. Then you release your attention from it and come back to the mind and body. You're anchoring your mind back to the present through the mind and body. And then you relax. Notice any tightness or tension anywhere in the body and relax. You might notice that you're no longer smiling, so check in and make sure that your smile is still there. If it's not, please smile.

And then come back to the glowing feeling in your heart and stay with it. This is how you let go of distractions. Recognize, oh, my mind got distracted. Release your attention. Relax the mind and body. Back to the smile, and come back to the feeling of loving kindness. This is a feeling meditation. You want to stay rooted in the experience of loving kindness in your heart. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. The mind gets distracted, recognize it, release your attention, relax the body, back to the smile, re-smile, return back to the feeling of loving kindness.

What is a distraction? Distraction is anything that takes your attention fully away from the feeling of loving-kindness. If you notice thoughts in the background, if you notice things are going on in the background, but you're still staying with the loving-kindness, there's nothing to do. Just keep your attention there. But if the mind has wandered away completely from the feeling of loving-kindness, use the six R's: recognize, release, relax, re-smile, and return. Repeat whenever you get distracted again.

Just come back to the feeling of loving kindness and let's stay there. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Now that you're basking in this feeling, it's time to send it to a spiritual friend. Spiritual friend, that's translated from the word kalyana mitta, basically somebody that is a good friend of yours, somebody that you admire, somebody that you respect. This friend cannot be a relative. They must be alive, and they have to be of the same sex, so it can be anybody that you admire in public life. It can be somebody you know in your personal circle, whatever it is.

And I'd like you to, if it helps, imagine your spiritual friend, whomever you choose, standing in front of you and smiling at you. And now I would like you to direct that feeling of loving kindness in your heart to your spiritual friend. If it helps you, you can say to that friend, I want you to be happy, I want you to be free of suffering, I want you to be filled with loving kindness, or alternatives like, may you be happy, may you be free, may you be filled with loving kindness.

And if you're unable to visualize the friend, that's okay. You can imagine the spiritual friend in your heart, a small little person in your heart, basking in the feeling of loving kindness, and just stay with that feeling. The intention is that this loving kindness is directed to your friend. So let's do that now. Thank you. Thank you. Again, if your mind is distracted, your attention is completely away from the feeling of loving kindness towards your friend, recognize that, release your attention and bring it back to the awareness of mind and body, relax any tightness and tension, come back to your smile, come back to the feeling of loving kindness towards your friend. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And if you get distracted, just recognize the distraction. Mind is away from the object. It's okay for the distraction to be there. Recognize it. Release your attention from that. Bring it back to the mind and body and relax. Come back to the smile. Come back to the feeling of loving kindness towards your spiritual friend.

Distractions are not our enemies, they just help us to see where the mind becomes attached. Just allow them to be there. They are teachers. It's okay for them to be there. The more we try to push or control them, the more they resist and come in many more numbers into our mind. So the less you resist, stay present and okay with the distraction, the less it's likely to create any tension in the mind. You just recognize, release your attention, relax mind and body, re-smile, return back to your loving kindness and your spiritual friend. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. For the time being, we're going to close this meditation session.

I'd like you to just bring your awareness back to the body. Relax. And when you're ready, open your eyes back to here, the room. Thank you. I'd like to just close this off with some pointers and some things to consider during your retreat. First of all, you always want to sit for a minimum of 30 minutes.

And if you can sit longer and the meditation is going well, please sit longer, but the minimum should always be 30 minutes. And do some walking meditation as well. In the walking practice, you are doing essentially what you're doing in the sitting meditation. You're bringing up the loving kindness and your spiritual friend, and you stay with that loving awareness, that loving kindness with your spiritual friend.

And you don't do any kind of mindful walking in terms of how they might do it in other sessions, like in Vipassana and things like that. You're walking at a normal pace, as you would when you're walking down the street or you're walking in a park or whatever it might be. What you're paying attention to is the feeling of loving kindness.

And your spiritual friend, and what this will help you with is being able to bring up the quality and experience of loving kindness in any activity. It might not be as strong or profound when you're sitting, but at least it keeps going when you're doing the walking, and you can walk for 20 to 30 minutes, whatever seems comfortable for you. And make sure that when you wake up, before you go to sleep and set your alarm or whatever it might be, try to make two determinations.

One is, try to make a determination that I will wake up at so-and-so time. Let's say you set your alarm for 6 a.m. Say, I will wake up at 5:57, or I will wake up at 6:02. This is just an interesting thing to do, because it will be helpful later on in your practice, and you'll understand why when you're ready. But the more important determination to make is that you say, when I wake up, I will wake up with a smile on my face and with full awareness of what is happening, right? Because once you have the smile, that anchors you to the present moment, and you keep that going when you wake up. If it's nice for you to do so, you can meditate right there and then. You can just sit in bed and send a little bit of loving kindness to yourself and your spiritual friend, and then start your day.

Keep that feeling going as much as you can when you're taking a shower, when you are making breakfast, when you're eating breakfast, when you're attending to your dogs, to your children, to whatever other responsibilities you might have. Keep that loving-kindness going, and make it a point to spend some time reviewing some of the documents, like the PDF which has the loving-kindness instructions. And of course, please do not skip, first and foremost, any of the interviews. So be on time. Try to be there five minutes before your interview so you'll be in the waiting room, and we can keep it consistently moving because you only have 10 minutes.

And in those 10 minutes, I will be asking you those five questions, and I'll be asking you how your meditation is going, and so on. So keep the dialogue to a minimum in reference to just your practice. I always say in my talks, in my intro talks, that I'm not a therapist. None of the TWIM teachers or guides, even though they might be qualified, some of them are qualified to be so. In the retreat, we are not your therapists.

We're not here to go through what my father did, what my mother did. I didn't have a loving childhood and all of these other things. Yes, we can go over what's happening in your meditation. And if you're feeling a block or whatever, then we'll discuss that. And I'll give you some remedies for that, which will help to keep your bitter chatter to a minimum.

Ideally, you want to have noble silence throughout the day. It might not be possible because you're living in a household where you have your partner, your spouse, friends, roommates, whatever it is. But try to be as silent as possible. Do everything with a loving awareness. That is to say, bring loving kindness to everything that you're doing. Stay in silence as much as you can.

So the other part of this is, please watch the videos, because they are very beneficial for not just your practice, but for understanding deeper aspects of what it is that we teach in reference to the Pali Canon, that is, the four or five Nikayas. Those are the four or five books that are the words of the Buddha, what the Buddha has talked about in terms of how the mind works and so on. You see, every time you do this process of the six R's, you don't need to only do it in the meditation. You do it all throughout the day as much as you can, because you're taking loving kindness and keeping it in your mind all the time. That's your anchor to the present. That's your anchor all the time.

Every time your mind gets distracted, it goes somewhere else. Using the six R's, what you're doing is sharpening your mindfulness. Mindfulness has two components in the Pali. Mindfulness usually comes from the word sati, but there are two components to it: sati and sampajanya. Sati is memory, to remember, to recall, to remember to be here in the present moment. And sampajanya is knowing where your attention is. So when you bring it together, you are remembering to observe how your mind's attention moves from one object to the other. That's it. That's all mindfulness is. You might hear about mindfulness, mindfully eating, mindfully walking, mindfully whatever it is, but that's only one component, which is to be anchored here and now. You also keep aware of where your mind's attention is going.

This is what is known as samatha and vipassana. The samatha part is where the mind becomes collected. That is your composure, your collectedness. Your attention remains undivided, unscattered. The vipassana aspect is understanding how your mind works: where are the cravings of the mind, how do they arise, how does aversion arise, how does restlessness arise? You notice your mind goes here, and you don't need to investigate and analyze. You're just recognizing your mind got distracted. You're taking your awareness back into the present, coming back to the mind and body, relaxing. Why do you relax? Because you're relaxing the craving. Craving is an obsessive quality to the mind that says, I need to do this, I am this, I want this, I don't like this, I hate this, whatever it is. I hate it, or I want, or I am.

And it manifests as tightness and tension in the mind and body. So when you relax, you're tight, you're loosening up that tightness. You're releasing and letting go of that tension. For a split moment, you're experiencing mundane nibbana. Your mind is like clear as the sky, without any clouds, without any thoughts, without any projections. And then from that, you come back to the smile. Your mind becomes uplifted. The smile helps you anchor into that. And you come back to the feeling.

So the six R's are meant to be a process of reconditioning the mind from always tending towards things that might be unwholesome, things that might be distracting, things that just are useless, not necessary in order for you to have peace of mind. You're reconditioning the mind from going in that direction and inclining it towards a space where you have more clarity, sharpness of mind, more loving kindness, more compassion for yourself and others, and accepting things as they are. There are two things primary to people who are meditating or in this retreat that they usually will have a hard time with, maybe the first one or two days, maybe more, but we'll see. The first is trying too hard. There's an enthusiasm, or an over-enthusiasm, to want to try to bring as much loving kindness into our minds, to be as meditative as possible, to be as collected and focused as possible. And what that will do is create resistance. Every action has a reaction. The more you do this, the more it's going to come back to you, and it's going to create all kinds of distractions.

So be relaxed in your effort. Be aware. Be relaxed. Take it in stride. The more you can smile, the more you can laugh, the more you can be like a little child, the more you can celebrate, the easier the meditation is going to become for you. This is what I say about the world. The world, all of us here, are actually still little children.

When we're little kids, we have a tendency to want to grow up as fast as we can. But nobody knows what the heck is going on in this world. Our world leaders, the people in management, our parents, our teachers, we think, oh, they know it, they got it. They have this semblance of everything being in control.

Nobody knows. They're all little children trying to make the best we can of our time here. Why don't you fully embrace that and be a little child, have fun, frolic, laugh, enjoy yourself. You have the next 10 days, 9, 8, 9 days, whatever it is, to really be in touch with that nature of being a little kid.

And loving kindness is the nature of a little kid. When you were a little child, I know when I was a little kid, when I went to the playground, I made friends with everybody. It was so easy. We play around and, okay, now you're my friend. You don't even have to talk about it. I just have friendliness towards you. You have friendliness towards me. And there we go. Let's have some fun.

That's the attitude to have for yourself and for others around you. Just in summary, sit for a minimum of 30 minutes, do the walking practice, because that will help. Make the determination at least to wake up with a smiling face and being with full awareness. And try to keep the feeling of loving kindness going at all times.

And six R's whenever you get distracted. And celebrate. And for those of you who have already done this before, and you are considered to be an advanced meditator, you're radiating in different directions, start from there. Start with some loving kindness to yourself, and then radiate out into the different directions. I think that's pretty much it.